


[Meta] Episode 4.17 ("Ma Lalo o ka 'ili")

by wanderlustlover



Series: Hawaii Five-0 Season Four Meta [9]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Meta, Multi, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-27 01:54:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2674535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meta from Season Four, per a special request (and an epic amount of patience).</p>
            </blockquote>





	[Meta] Episode 4.17 ("Ma Lalo o ka 'ili")

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alemara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alemara/gifts), [SabbyBrina84](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SabbyBrina84/gifts).



> _OH THANK YOU! It's episode 17, specifically around the 11:50 mark (in case you want to avoid the rest of it, cause I'm with you about the awfulness of S4). You're right, Jerry did just kind of stumble onto it, but I was surprised that Steve wasn't more upset in the first place. In fact Jerry and Steve's entire relationship intrigues me. Steve seems to be much more patient with him than he is with anyone else._ \-- sabbybrina

Okay. So I actually sat down and flicked through most of the Jerry-Steve scene’s in 4.17, because you know me. I need actual canon references and this going to end up a spool of complicated opinions about the Season 4 writing that dovetail into your question that kind of can’t be avoided.

I feel like Jerry’s writing in S4 in a lot of places is as heavy handed and convenient in places as Grover’s. Because instead of growing the relationships through natural progression, the show reorders everything around them or it uses them as the convenient scapegoat to trash something else.

Such is the case in point of where we find Jerry-Steve this episode, because they start off in this episode with Jerry’s “Farewell Breakfast” which is following his “Farewell dinner” and in the middle of a conversation where it’s obvious Jerry is desperately, and a little too pitifully, doing anything he can to not be walking out the door yet.

And it’s right in the middle of this first conversation of them that they use Jerry and Jerry-Steve as the scapegoat to have Steve say “It wasn’t you. It was me. I like to live alone,” canceling out Catherine’s obvious living there earlier in the season and Steve calling it her home in the beginning of the season without one iota of involving Catherine’s character in that sudden change.

Which made me really mad, because it was another tin in the can about how badly they were handling the juggernaut pummeling of Catherine-Steve and especially the dissolution and removal of Catherine from the show and Steve’s life. (BUT. We’re not *discussing* this topic, just mentioning it tangentially because it’s massive in Jerry-Steve’s first conversation and a clear call to the kind of thing they are using these two to do.)

Jerry is basically being treated entirely as a desperate puppy in their scenes. He’s making extraordinary meals. He’s saying he can get a C-Pap. He’s asking for hugs. He’s making comments like “But we’re still friends, right?” He’s left staring at his table full of food that no one touched when Steve runs off to his case, after telling Jerry he needs to stop doing this. 

When the next scene happens Steve is, justifiably, confused and annoyed at Jerry. Who is not only not leaving, he’s showing up at The Palace having ganked his father’s tool box in the act of doing laundry, which, also, wasn’t leaving his house and moving home. And he makes a point of pointing that out. Wanting to know why Jerry was even in the garage to begin with.

I don’t think he looks all that patient in this scene, so much as like he’s watching the newest excuse for why Jerry still hasn’t left. Keeps inserting himself into places and acts that will make it so he doesn’t have to stop clinging to Steve. Along with Steve, I find the whole thing more patronizing, invasive and desperate/manipulative of Jerry than cute (which is how we’ve given to see Cath & Chin laughing at him/them and existing a fast stage right). 

But once again, Steve lets him put it out there — his newest reasons to stay there five seconds longer — and this time the show uses Jerry to bounce into Doris, which does two things. 1 — it makes Jerry integral to the ongoing longest plot line (that hasn’t a clue how to be written well) and 2 — it brings in Doris (which makes Steve very nearly incapable of entirely clear thought, because, well, it’s his Mom, and Complicated is stamped all over that).

I’m, seriously, with Steve when he’s all annoyedly short on his comments through the red-(American Rose-Alizarin Crimson) comments. I know where they are going, but when he picks up the tool box, turns it over and goes “WA-LA!” about the hidden message it’s really MAGICALLY convenient of the writing that somehow Jerry found and scraped off the *only* two inches under the entire repainting job that hid a code/cypher message. 

But the scene does what it needs itself to do, it shoves Steve off step from evening being able to be annoyed at needing Jerry to leave (and with Jerry any implication of cohabitational intimacy with Cath), and twists the focus on to Doris (who Steve needs more, and suddenly, thusly, needs Jerry to help find and gives Jerry a job to do, that isn’t exiting stage right immediately). 

The next scene we get of them, we have Steve walking back into his own office that is now covered in glass writing, post-its and Jerry’s own references to it looking all “A Beautiful Mind.” We go quickly from Steve really not okay that his office is covered in crazy to Jerry lecturing about codes (that Steve should already know about circa five years with Naval Intelligence, but who’s counting logic in here, S4 definitely wasn’t). 

But the scene goes on to showcase Jerry’s conspiracy theory knowledge as important to being able to break the Polybius Square cypher. Which gets us to the coordinates they need for Steve-Danny running off in the next (or two after, or whichever) episode, searching for the body. 

—

As for your second part of the question, I think Jerry is handled in a lot of ways I’m not positive I love through the end of Season 4, when there’s a lot of heavy handed shuffling of everyone without commentary. 

Cath is constantly being pulled from being in episodes nearly at all or ever being scened near Steve (or even appearing in two episode in the exact same costume without any show effort being displayed at all); Steve is reformatting canon in his relating the beginning with Jameson to Grover (which, nope, sorry, you can’t redo episode 1, it actually exists); and then you have Jerry.

Even though I love Jorge as an actor, I am only vaguely okay with Jerry in the show right now, because I don’t trust a lot of the show’s writing from S4. (Even though I am crazy on the 5.01 band wagon, and warily hopeful about the idea of a Season Five H50 reboot). Jerry is our over weight, under-socialized That Guy who never grew up, never moved out of his mom’s basement, and is obsessed with conspiracy theories. 

Which is, I think, how a lot of Five-0 ends up viewing him, and heavily why the show thought he needed to be drug, shoved, wedged into being integral to impossible to ignore plot lines of Shelburne/Wo Fat. 

He’s That Guy it’s okay to love and hate and pity all at once, who doesn’t endanger any plot line or set of people. There’s nothing risky about his character, he endangers no relationship currently in the show, and no chances have to be taken with him to showcase him just the way he is. Which is a really safe thing for them to do with Jerry, versus Cath and Grover, who are all over made of the opposite. 

Contextually, I think we’re supposed to see Steve’s patience (and impatience, because both of them still happen all the time) with Jerry as supposed to be an extension of Steve’s continual growth and ability to deal with people more. I’m not sure I entirely believe in it yet, and I think most of Jerry-Steve so far in the end of Season Four was heavy handed and entirely unbelievable, but.

I’m sort of giving Season Five the benefit of the doubt for a while yet.


End file.
